DuckDuckGo AI Chat

[mostlysimilar]

God damn it people. I just want to search the web. You aren't doing anything meaningful by giving me yet another fuzzy robot question machine. Just let me search the web. Queries in, web pages out.

[unsupp0rted]

I just don't want to search the web. I have questions and I want answers- searching the web is an intermediate step, not the end solution.

I have Question X and the answer isn't to surface "Blog Post Y"... it's the content of Blog Post Y I need, and only the subset of the content that answers my question, perhaps synthesized with the content of 5 other blog posts, a couple scientific papers and a recent press release.

We're now in this temporary zone where "just searching the web" is still the optimal way to get answers, while search engine companies are piling into other stuff.

But very shortly that other stuff will become our go-to.

[yegg]

This (DuckDuckGo AI Chat) is currently separate from search results, and in any case we plan to offer settings to turn off any AI search integrations, similarly for how we do for instant answers and ads.

[ein0p]

A lot of the time you aren't searching for "web pages". You are searching for answers, to get to which you'd have to dig through piles of web pages for an hour. Technology already exists to give you a direct answer in 95% of the time (with references), it just results in fewer ads shown to you, so search engines aren't interested in integrating it properly.

[kube-system]

This is an intermediary step to what will ultimately upend search: LLMs parsing web search results and giving you succinct results without you having to read them yourself.

If you haven't tried Arc Search's "Browse for Me" feature, you should. It isn't perfect yet, but I think it's clear that's the direction of search in the future.

[dkersten]

Agreed. Additionally, I don’t actually want to talk to my computer for most use cases. When I do, then I’ll use a dedicated service like ChatGPT, but for most other take, I really really don’t want a chat interface.

I wish these companies would focus on making their core product better instead of spending resources on AI chat interfaces.

[maltalex]

> God damn it people. I just want to search the web.

Who's preventing you from doing that?

[bastawhiz]

I'm quite a fan of how Kagi does it: they'll only give you back AI answers if you end your query with a question mark. For when I'm looking for a fact, it's very helpful and never gets in the way.

[doublerabbit]

That now costs $10 (Kagi)

Complex AI for free, basic search for a fee!

[danpalmer]

What's the business model on this? GPT3.5 and Claude 1.2 aren't as expensive as other models, but they're not cheap. Is this going to get pulled later, monetised, etc?

It's concerning in general to see so many companies throwing so much money at this without business models. The big names mostly have either premium tiers or paid API usage, that's fine, but DDG/Brave/BingChat/Arc/etc are all just giving away money, and when the music stops it's possible consumers will be left high and dry.

[yegg]

The plan is to maintain free anonymous access to base models, with eventually search better integrated as well. We'd also like to experiment with providing anonymous access to more cutting-edge models as part of Privacy Pro.

[maltalex]

It'll probably not be free forever. Access to the models could become part of their "Pro" offering - https://duckduckgo.com/pro

[jrmg]

Being DDG, with its reputation, I’m sure these chats really are never saved - but the wording in the sidebar:

never saved by us, and not used to train AI models

could make the more paranoid believe that they could be saved by DDG’s partners - from very directly (Anthropic saves chats with Claude) to indirectly (all channeled through a shady arms-length subsidiary).

[yegg]

See https://duckduckgo.com/aichat/privacy-terms

"We do not save or store your Prompts or Outputs.

Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic).

If you submit personal information in your Prompts, it may be reproduced in the Outputs, but no one can tell whether it was you personally submitting the Prompts or someone else.

We have agreements with model providers to further protect your privacy.

As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all information received within 30 days."

[MitPitt]

DDG has terrible reputation, what are you talking about. From sharing user data with Microsoft, to hiding websites in search due to political bias

[dougb5]

"Welcome to DuckDuckGo AI Chat! This chat session is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo. All of your chats here are private, and are never stored by DuckDuckGo or used to train AI models."

Wait, they are sent to OpenAI but they are also "private"? What am I missing here?

[ziddoap]

>Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic).

>In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all information received within 30 days.

That is what they mean by private.

[mephitix]

I guess they mean that the chat conversations are not persisted in a DDG database. A bit misleading IMO

[ricardo81]

Interesting they use the word 'private' in their strapline, after all they frame themselves as private search albeit they don't have their own search engine and market themselves as a privacy search engine. Their index is essentially Bing and they're hosted on Microsoft IPs. So not exactly ideal.

[binarymax]

But none of your personal details are sent to Bing? Sure they get some SERPS from them, but DDG abstracts in front of Bing's API using your query without passing your data.

[JAlexoid]

The privacy comes from the lack of tracking your interests and tailoring the search results to the preexisting interests.

They just don't collect the private data in the first place.

[ricardo81]

Tried a few searches, no sources listed.

I don't buy into a future where I'm spoon-fed an answer with no way to verify it. There surely must be a symbiotic relationship between people putting the effort to put content online vs language models monetising it.

[rodolphoarruda]

I didn't know Claude until I saw it as an option for DDG chat model. What caught my attention was the tagline "instant". Interesting. I decided to give it a try with expectations to see answers coming up almost instantly. And they really did. I'm enjoying it so far.

[jasonjmcghee]

For what it's worth, Claude instant is part of Anthropic's first generation of models. There have been two more since then. Today (3rd gen) they have haiku, sonnet, opus. Worth checking out. Opus is competitive (many say better) than GPT-4

[cube2222]

I tried this, and it seems like this is just raw AI chat, no search?

I do extremely like the Kagi fastgpt feature, which lets you end your search query with a question mark, and above the search results you'll get an AI answer, that is based on the content of the top 4-8 results.

It's very fast and provides citations to the links it used, so it feels quite trustworthy (or at least as trustworthy as the sources it cites), which means I often use the feature and am happy with the response I get.

[hedora]

Test query:

Buy bulk pvc in cheyenne, wy

FastGPT from kagi recommends national chains, a local plumbing supply store or two, and a specific facebook market page. All of these have hyperlinks.

DDG just gives generic advice about national chains.

I think the difference is that Kagi built a RAG model out of a web crawl.

[tantalor]

What does "bulk pvc" even mean.

Pipe? Fittings? Tubing? Sheets? Fabric?

[ravetcofx]

It takes effort to integrate large language models with RAG or vector databases in an application rather than just slapping a chatbot on

[elorant]

Kagi search has something similar, and quite functional.

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

[derwiki]

It’s probably table stakes for a search engine at this point. For me though, they all came too late, and I am mostly rewired to go to chatgpt first.

(Yes, chatgpt can be wrong, but for things like recipes, song lyrics, etc it’s never wrong enough to matter)

[weberer]

This is a frontend to GPT-3.5 that protects your privacy. This isn't a new model by DuckDuckGo.

[NayamAmarshe]

Pretty cool! I use Brave Search (https://search.brave.com) and it too got AI results a few months ago. They're quite helpful!

[beretguy]

I’m glad they gave an option to turn it off for people who don’t care about AI.

[olvy0]

Fine, but this is a full chat interface rather than AI search results.

[dsr_]

Who, exactly, wanted to ask a search engine questions that would be answered by bullshit?

I quote:

    what is the stoichiometric ratio between 2NO2 and N2O4

The stoichiometric ratio between nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) is 1:1. This means that for every one molecule of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) that reacts, one molecule of dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) is formed. The equilibrium reaction between nitrogen dioxide and dinitrogen tetroxide can be represented as:

2NO2 ⇌ N2O4

In this reaction, two molecules of nitrogen dioxide can form one molecule of dinitrogen tetroxide, and vice versa.

[yegg]

AI Chat is separate from the search engine, providing anonymous access to popular models. On the search engine we have DuckAssist, which is currently grounded in Wikipedia (more sources coming): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+the+stoichiometric+ratio+b...

[fransje26]

It also happily fails the "Name 5 countries starting and ending with the same letter " test, with 0/5 using Claude..

[Imnimo]

I was expecting something where the AI chat could run DDG web searches. If it's just a mirror of GPT 3.5/Claude, why do I need DDG to be involved?

[ziddoap]

>Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic).

They are acting as a proxy to increase privacy, which is pretty much their entire business model.

[a_c]

I have been using DDG as my primary search engine for several years. Their search results is bad now. Not sure if it is deteriorating or it was always bad but I put up with it. DDG could have adopted the Kagi way, let users rank their result, or just genuinely improve the search result. And no, LLM won't help us as far as factual information is concerned.

[mdaniel]

Have you been using the feedback button, located (unfortunately) in the bottom right corner of the results page? I've been told they are read by actual humans

I'm with you that the results are sometimes just comically bad, but there are a lot of 80/20 products in my life, and they do offer the bangs to rerun the search on an alternate engine

[littlestymaar]

Pretty disapointed that this is just a proxy in front of Claude and ChatGPT, I thought it would be some kind of DDG-hosted llama3 8B since the quality is now good enough with a 8B model.

[yegg]

We plan to add more models over time.

[_pdp_]

Private meaning that they don't store the chat sessions? We don't store them either unless you really want to. Am I missing something?

[bo1024]

And they have agreements with the providers not to use your chats for training, and to delete them after 30 days (I believe).

[cdme]

Pretty easy to block the DOM node with my adblocker.

[nipperkinfeet]

I stopped using DDG right after they forced "Explore our features" to be enabled all the time.

[hnarn]

Thank you for providing the first AI “chat bot” with sane, privacy respecting defaults.